World leader in computer manufacture Dell Computer's rough first quarter was all it took to allow competitors Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo and Acer to climb back into the fray and rack up some serious growth figures.

Apple Computers was the biggest gainer as it saw a whopping 30 percent increase in its worldwide shipments. Its total U.S. market share rose from four percent to five percent, sealing a fantastic initial quarter performance. Hewlett-Packard also saw sharp increases with a 28.2 rise in shipments and an ownage of 19.1 percent of the total market.

Asian computer powers Lenovo and Acer are also growing. The Chinese firm that acquired the respected IBM hardware wing has showing it can ship PCs by the truckloads to become the third largest computer vendor on the planet.  Acer posted similar figures.

Dell, on the other hand, seems unable to cope with the times. The former king had its shipments drop by a significant 14 percent while its total market share is now only second to HP. U.S. sales are down even though the market grew by a tenth this year.

The woes of the company may have started when bad press spread like wildfire regarding its notebooks with severe, and sometimes explosive problems. The company has yet to regain momentum after the hard blow to its reputation.

Sony was the darling of the music world when it came out with the Walkman during the '80s and the 90's, until the iPod came along and Apple dethroned the Japanese multinational corporation. Now, Sony declares that it's learned its lesson and vows not to have the Sony Ericsson lose to the iPhone.

Sony's CEO Sir Howard Stringer admitted in a rare candid interview that he feels rueful about Sony's loss to the iPod. When he took helm in 2005, the company already had a stubborn design philosophy. All divisions were in their "own little worlds", sheltered from one another and interested only in how one of its products trumped another.

Stringer admitted that Sony's been working with IBM on electronic music distribution as early as 1997, and could have came out with a digital music player five years earlier than the iPod. But the music giant couldn't get its people to understand software. As a result, Apple took hold of the industry with its digital media player, the iPod.

However, Sony's CEO believes that the Sony Ericsson versus iPhone battle would be different. The Japanese-Swedish partnership has warmed up to newer ideas, including the concept of music on phones. But they'll never bet against Steve Jobs. In this new phone battle, thinking that your enemy is weak is a weakness itself.

The publicity on the whole Apple's stock option practices fiasco still hasn't died down, and now Apple CEO Steve Jobs is now fast becoming the target for further investigation. Now the question is, will Steve Jobs be graduating from the Apple board and walking down the hall of shame?

In previous interviews with Jobs, he claims that he doesn't know nor understand anything about the accounting implications. But IF the investigation finds that Jobs knew more about the company's practices than he's letting on, particularly about the accounting, recording, and reporting of grants, there's gotta be somebody to take his place right?

So who would be the possible replacements for Jobs? Over at AAPL, they have posted up a list of possible candidates to take the CEO position and they are:

• Phil Schiller - long-time head of global product marketing. He has been with the company since 1997 and has been critical in most product launches.
• Tim Cook - The company's COO, has had a long career at IBM and heads the Mac division.
• Tony Fedell - One of the fathers of the iPod; has an engineering background and is a former executive at Philips Electronics.
• William Campbell - One of Apple's leading directors. He has run a large public software company, Intuit.
• Jerome York - Although he is over 70, York has experience operating troubled companies. He was CFO of IBM and a member of that company's board. He is also on the GM board.
• Jim Allchin - Head of platforms and services at Microsoft, and plans to retire with the the launch of Vista. Also has an engineering background.
• Sue Decker - The highly regarded CFO of Yahoo! She has a Wall St. background and now runs several key divisions at Yahoo!
• John Thompson - The highly-regarded CEO of Symantec, has a background in running a large software company and is well liked on Wall Street.

How about you, who do you think would be the best replacement for Steve Jobs?

Business Week reported that Apple's brand value went up by 14% last year raising its position in the magazine's Best Global Brand Survey from No. 39th to 41.  According to Business Week, the company continues to be "the style master with its expanded family of iPods and Macs. Its latest hit: the MacBook line of laptops."  Apple's brand equity is currently valued at $9.13 billion.

The annual BusinessWeek/Interbrand rankings measure an elusive but crucial quality known as brand value. This year's list includes Coca-Cola (No.1), Microsoft (No.2) and IBM (No.3). Other brands that made the cut are Motorola, Hyundai, Google, and McDonald's.

R.Tyler Ballance's blog say that he sucks at computers, yet he's been giving his readers the nitty-gritty about Mac computer. Recently, due to an inquiry by BuildFactory icon graphics designer Fernando, he explains why the kernel_task contains too many threads and takes up a high percentage of the virtual memory.

First, Tyler gives us a bit of background on Mach. He shares, "Mach is one of the more successful stories in microkernel development, Mac OS X is based around the Mach microkernel, as well as the NeXTStep of old, as well as DEC's OSF/1, and IBM's frequently deceased OS/2 (at least for RS6000 machines). In accordance with the basic concept of a microkernel, Mach manages memory, and handles inter-process communication but not much else."

After this backgrounder, Tyler start answering the question, "What exactly is a kernel_task"? Since the kernel_task is a mere "representation of the microkernel itself" it is not, therefore, really a "task". It being a PID 0, we can all assume it is not userland-related.

There may be little documentation on kernel_task but from the little info available, Tyler was able to assume that the kernel task may be the basic (virtual/)memory manager for Mac OS X on top of Mach, which is similar to L4 microkernel's sigma0 concept. He confidently declares that "kernel_task is responsible for handling the allocation of pages of memory in the Xnu kernel (Mach+IOKit+whatever else Apple threw in), which would explain why it has an amazing amount of threads".

Yet another process, dynamic_pager, shows up and it is possible that this task is the one that handles swap file for Mac OS X. If this is indeed true, what is dynamic_pager's connection with kernel_task? Tyler assumes, "It's quite possible that kernel_task and dynamic_pager work together of a Mach port, and when necessary, kernel_task runs out of available resources, it serves up memory from a swap file managed by dynamic_pager."

Although most of the info provided Tyler have no strong document back-up, and some even being mere speculation, he hopes that he was able to put some light on what kernel_task is. Check out Tyler's other article on the Mac OS X internals here.

If you think about it, at the rate manufacturers in general are going, updating their existing products or developing new ones, the technology that we knew maybe 2-3 months ago, has suddenly become obsolete. Now what to do with the "obsolete products" that we have acquired during the course of our tech life? Sure we can make a museum of it. Watch as it's price hit the roof because of it being a relic and make a killing over at eBay. Or we could dispose of them properly and send them off to a recycling plant.

Australia, lead by the Australian Information Industry Association, is a favorite among major computer-makers such as HP, Dell, and IBM, that already offer successful recycling programs in the land down under. But it seems like although Apple has began its global recycling initiative in 1996, with efforts in the US, Canada, Japan and Europe, the campaign has not started in Australia.

"Apple doesnÂ?t have a recycling program in Australia like we do in the U.S.; however, we are currently talking to the AIIA about creating a potential program,Â? said Apple spokesperson John Marks.

Griffith University electronic waste expert Sunil Heart said there are more than nine million computers in use around Australia, and this year a further 2.1 million computers will enter the market, while more than three million are expected to become obsolete. She hopes that there will be initiative from Apple to also make a computer take-back in that part of the globe.

The last time Mac OS 6 was commonly in use, most of today's high-school students hadn't even been born.

The System 6 machines - the Mac Classic, Mac Plus and the Mac IIci - were ludicrously underpowered by today's blistering standards. For an age in which RAM, HD space and processor speed are measured in the "giga" range, using a Mac Classic with 4 MB of RAM running at 8 (that's eight) MHz would seem tantamount to driving a Ford Model T (last built in 1927).

Despite this difference, some hard-core Mac fans insist that System 6 is actually  better for some computing tasks - particularly word processing. Is it possible that a vintage 1990 Apple running OS 6 can open a Microsoft Word document faster than a new PC running Windows 2000? You may be surprised.

According to "Moore's Law," computer performance grows exponentially, doubling about every two years. It therefore makes sense that the latest computer would perform  tasks at least 500 times faster than something built sixteen years ago. All other factors being equal, this is true...

But.

Anyone who has used computers for any length of time has no doubt noticed that file size has expanded as much as horsepower has increased. When I started using the popular 3D figure modeler Poser back in '95, a file was typically between 200 and 500 KB. Today, a single Poser model (such as "David" or "Stephanie") can run over a 100 megabytes. Same with the applications - the correlation to Moore's Law is that software expands to consume all resources available to it. If you've used MS Word for any length of time, you know what's being talked about, here.

For kicks and giggles, some hard-core vintage Mac geeks ran some tests, putting various System 6 Macs up against an "average" modern PC. The Mac models - a Classic and a IIci - were tested both in their "stock" forms and with some processor upgrades (none running faster than 40 MHz). The Windows machine was an IBM Think Center with a 3 GHz Pentium 4HT processor, 512 MB RAM, running MS Word 2002 with Windows 2000 Pro.

The results are shown on the charts below (click thumbnails to see full-sized images). Who'd have thought?